Lord Westbury broke it first.
“You let her run.”
“I did.”
“In front of two hundred people. You stood in my way. You laid your hands on me in your own chapel.”
“I stepped in front of you, but I laid no hands on anyone.” Cassian held his eyes. “And yes, I let her run. I gave her acarriage and let her run because I got it into my head that loving a woman meant handing her the door. But I was wrong. It was the single greatest mistake of my life, and I have come to ask whether I can fix it.” He paused. “Properly.”
He took a deep breath. “I asked you once for her hand as a man closing a bargain. I am asking you now as a man who cannot sleep. There is a difference, and you are entitled to mark it.”
Lord Westbury looked at him for a long time.
“Alice,” he said at last, and his gruff voice caught strangely on the word, “is the best of my children. I am aware that a father should not say so. I have two children, and I love them both, but Alice is the best. She has been the best since she was a small thing carrying her toys to her baby sister because she had decided all on her own, at the age of five, that the baby should not feel unwelcome. She has spent her whole life like that. Carrying her toys to other people.”
He turned and looked into the dead fire. “Her mother and I did not make it easy for her to want things for herself. We meant well. We’ve always meant well. But she learned, somewhere under this roof, that her wants meant nothing. I have watched her carry everyone else’s happiness on her back for twenty-five years like a girl carrying water and never once set the buckets down.”
He was silent for a moment.
“When she ran from the chapel, do you know what I felt under the rage? Under the shame?”
“No.”
“I felt glad.” Lord Westbury said it to the fire, as though it were a confession. “For one moment, before the shame caught up with me, I thought at last she had done something for herself, even if it would ruin us. And then I was ashamed of being glad, and then I went home and burned the papers.”
He turned back. His eyes, Daphne’s blue eyes, were not entirely dry which neither man acknowledged.
“If you can teach her to set the buckets down, if you can be a man who lets her want things out loud in her own house without making her feel she has stolen them, then you may have her, along with my blessing. I will stand in that chapel on Thursday and give her to you with a happy heart, and I will never mention the carriage again so long as I live.” He held out his hand. “Can you do that, Your Grace?”
“I have a house,” Cassian said, taking it, “painted entirely with flowers because she likes to make a mess and a dog I swore I would never own because she wanted one and a studio I reopened because she gave it back to me. I have been letting her want things for a week. I intend to do it for fifty years. I am rather good at it. It is the only thing I have ever been good at that my father did not teach me.”
Lord Westbury let out a laugh. It was a short, rusty bark of a laugh, like a gate that had not been opened in years, and it startled them both.
“Stay for dinner,” he offered. “My wife will faint with joy, and my younger daughter will ask the Marquess of Dowton forty questions about beetles, and you will be bored to the bone. It will be your first taste of the family you are marrying into. Consider it a fair warning.”
Cassian stayed for dinner.
He was, in fact, bored to the bone.
He watched Daphne and Isaac bend toward one another over the fish course, shy and bright and entirely lost in some shared rapture concerning the wing of a beetle. He watched Lady Westbury weep happily into her soup three separate times, and he watched Lord Westbury be gruff and awkward and, underneath it, plainly relieved.
He thought of his father’s dinners, the cold correct silence of them, the terror of using the wrong fork, and understood that he was being shown, across this loud, untidy, overflowing table, the exact opposite of everything that had made him. He would give a great deal to raise his own children in a house that sounded like this one, and not like the house from his childhood.
Afterward, he found Isaac in the hall while the ladies went upstairs.
“Dowton.”
“Your Grace.” The young Marquess flushed and bowed.
He was a slight, scholarly, gentle creature, and Cassian, who could have broken him over one knee, found that he liked him enormously because Daphne looked at him the way Alice looked at what she meant to keep.
“You mean to marry the younger sister.”
“I—That is, I have not yet. I had thought to wait until after your wedding, so as not to… That is, I would not for the world presume to?—”
“Do not wait.” Cassian regarded him. “I waited. I waited, and I refused, and I handed the woman I love the door, and I have spent every hour since undoing it. I am the cautionary tale that the poets will write about. Do not be cautious.
“Speak to her father, who is, you may have noticed, in an unusually agreeable humor this evening on account of the soup and the beetles, and ask Daphne tomorrow before the mood passes. Take it from a man who knows. Caution is the most expensive thing a coward buys, and he buys it on credit, and the bill comes due all at once.”
